At this year’s Bridge Conference  you’ll hear a lot about ideas.  The big idea…the winning package…the breakthrough campaign…the creative that beat the control.

You’ll hear about data and strategy and of course about artificial intelligence. And about major donors and monthly donors and lapsed donors and donors who gave once in 1997 and might, with the right message, give again. Of course, also lots about the folks who dreamed up the campaigns

What you won’t hear much about are the people who made sure it happened. Those who checked the quantities, found the paper, called the printer, watched the postal dates,  noticed the reply envelope was wrong before two million of them were produced.

These are the folks who answer the phone when something goest sideways, who solved that first problem and will solve the next one.

They do this without applause because the mail has to go out.  Because the donors are waiting and the nonprofit needs the money.  Mostly because somewhere beyond the spreadsheets and production schedules, a hungry person needs food,  a frightened child needs shelter, a patient needs treatment and civil right needs defending.  They do the work that has to be done.

Greg Albright Understands 

For more than four decades, Greg , who announced he will retire next week has worked in a key, but largely unsung sector of fundraising and marketing. With George Lizama and Wayne Lizama, he’s helped build Production Solutions into one of the most respected production management firms in the nonprofit world.

For 40 years, Production Solutions has served nonprofit organizations first as an independent company for 30 years, then for the last decade as part of Moore.

That is the business history.  It matters, but it’s not the whole story.

The whole story is in the campaigns that arrived on time, in the problems donors never knew had occurred, in the organizations that grew because somebody knew how to turn a creative concept into several million pieces of mail—and get those pieces where they was supposed to go.

It’s in the people Greg hired.  The folks he encouraged.  The people he taught and then trusted with more responsibility than they believed they were ready for.

Shannon McCracken  of The Nonprofit Alliance described what may be the most important part of Greg’s legacy: the “multiplier effect” of the people he recruited, uplifted, and sometimes “voluntold” into important roles. She wrote that new chapters will continue to be written by people whom Greg told, simply, that they could—and should.

That is how a profession is built.  Not only through innovations–through people.  One person looks at another and says: “You can do this.” Then gives them the chance.

Greg helped build more than a company.  He helped build a community.  He served the organizations that support and strengthen the fundraising profession, including The Nonprofit Alliance, the Direct Marketing Association of Washington Educational Foundation, and the Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association.   He also helped create the Bridge Conference– where many Agitator readers are gathering today.

Barbara Armentrout remembers a task force in 2004 and 2005 that led to the first Bridge Conference. Greg, she says, played a major role in gathering and analyzing the information that helped bring it into being. Now, at the 21st Bridge Conference, she offers the only appropriate instruction:  “Take a bow.”

Absolutely!  Greg should take a bow and accept all the thanks and good wishes he richly deserves.  But Greg’s story gives us a chance to do something larger as this Bridge Conference gets underway.  It gives us a chance to look past the podium, past the awards, past the copywriter taking credit for a brilliant lead, past the strategist touting the strategy.  And certainly past the consultant explaining why everything worked precisely as that consultant had predicted.

We need to also recognize and  honor those production managers with three phones ringing, the unsung folks in customer service talking patiently to a donor whose address is wrong.  Too often we fail to adequately appreciate the account executive who found an alternative supplier at six o’clock on a Friday night, and the postal expert who saved the organization money nobody else knew it was about to lose.

And let’s not overlook the people double checking the data dumps, reading proofs, tracking inventory, and reconciling invoices.  These are the folks who understand that “approximately” is not a quantity and “sometime next week” is not a mail date.  These people rarely appear in case studies and don’t often get their pictures taken holding an award or throphy.

They are the connective tissue of fundraising; without them, “the strategy “ is little more than a document, creative just a PDF, and data only a file.

In the real world the appeal is simply an intention.  Production turns that intention into action.  It takes something imagined in a conference room  or Zoom session and makes it real enough for a donor to hold in her hands.

This is not secondary work.  This is the work.

John Thompson wrote that Greg Albright, George Lizama, and Wayne Lizama are leaving direct-response fundraising stronger than they found it. Then he added something less technical and more important:  “Thanks also for being one of the good guys. We need more people like you.”

We do.

Because competence matters.  Reliability matters.  Kindness matters.  The way you make people feel when the pressure is on matters.

Carolyn Angelini remembers that Greg made her feel welcome and valued from her first day at Production Solutions. Others speak of his warmth, his mentorship, his calm leadership, his generosity, his integrity, and his willingness to share what he knew.

These are not soft qualities.  They are the hard structure beneath lasting institutions.  You can build a company on transactions for a while, but a legacy is built on trust.

Greg says  the nonprofit fundraising community became far more than a career. It gave him purpose, friendship, learning, and the opportunity to work beside people trying to make the world better.

That feeling is returned.  The messages on LinkedIn marking his retirement do not read like professional courtesies.  They read like gratitude.  People are thanking  him for his guidance, his friendship, for believing in them, for helping their businesses grow and their organizations succeed.  For being there.

Greg also gave credit where it belonged.  To George and Wayne Lizama, his business partners and lifelong friends. To Vickie Hector, whom he called the heart and soul of Production Solutions.  And to Ben Harris, Gretchen Littlefield, and Jim Moore, and the folks now carrying  the enterprise forward.

And to his husband, Wesley Combs, for the love and patience that helped make the journey possible.  That, too, tells us something;  because the people who know how to make things happen usually know they never made them happen alone.

Greg  is retiring.  The mail will still go out. The Bridge Conference rooms will fill.  There will be new strategies, new tools, new channels, and new people announcing that fundraising has been completely reinvented.

But beneath all of it, the old truth will remain.   Somebody has to make it happen.  Somebody has to take responsibility for the details.  Somebody has to care whether the job is done right.

Today, we honor Greg Albright. And We honor the company he helped build and the people he brought into the profession and the organizations made stronger by his work.

And through Greg, The Agitator honors a whole class of people whose names are too often left off the program.  The production managers.  The customer service teams. The account people. The printers.  The letter shops.  The postal experts.  The proofreaders.  The schedulers.  The problem-solvers.  The people behind the people on the stage.

They do not merely support the mission.  They deliver it.

Thank you, Greg.

And to all the others who make the work happen: We see you, we know what you have done.

Take a bow.

Roger